Static Inertia: The Legal Challenges to Making Progress on an Effective Military Information Strategy
Mark Visger | 01.04.22
Editor’s note: This article is the first in the Army Cyber Institute’s (ACI) contribution to the series, “Compete and Win: Envisioning a Competitive Strategy for the Twenty-First Century.” The series endeavors to present expert commentary on diverse issues surrounding US competitive strategy and irregular warfare with peer and near-peer competitors in the physical, cyber, and information spaces. The series is part of the Competition in Cyber Project (C2P), a joint initiative by ACI and MWI. Special thanks to series editors Capt. Maggie Smith, PhD, C2P director, and Dr. Barnett S. Koven.
The United States military is constantly reorganizing and retooling itself to address information operations in gray-zone competition. Unfortunately, forward progress is hard to come by, and operations in the information environment remain an Achilles’ heel, which adversaries use against us to great effect. There is no shortage of ideas and proposals to address the information operations problem, but no solution has been able to overcome the static inertia and impel progress.
One of the major reasons for the static inertia is the constitutional and legal framework that our nation is built upon. Behind all the discussions is a nagging sense that the entire enterprise is just wrong—after all, the United States is a liberal democracy, we do not engage in state-sponsored propaganda, and there should be no Ministry of Truth in America. The whole prospect sounds utterly distasteful.
https://mwi.usma.edu/static-inertia-the-legal-challenges-to-making-progress-on-an-effective-military-information-strategy/
